Anita - Dances of Vice

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Movie
Original title Anita - Dances of Vice
Country of production Federal Republic of Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1988
length 89 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Rosa von Praunheim
script Rosa von Praunheim, Lotti Huber , Hannelene Limpach, Marianne Enzensberger
production Rosa von Praunheim, Road Movies / ZDF
music Konrad Elfers , Rainer Rubbert , Alan Marks, Wilhelm Dieter Siebert , Ed Lieber
camera Elfi Mikesch (color / bw)
occupation

Anita - Dances of Vice is a German feature film by Rosa von Praunheim from 1988.

action

An old woman conjures up her eventful life as a great dancer of the silent film era in transfigured images, before her vita turns out to be a dream that has grown to the point of madness. Anita Berber was a nude dancer and silent film diva in the 1920s, a "cocaine-sniffing figurehead of the splendid decadence society." (Ponkie) The film shows the present (in black and white) in a cut against the silent film visions with subtitles (in color): A mentally disturbed old woman - played by Lotti Huber as a brilliantly funny bag with a cheeky wit and a brazen zest for life - bares her backside on the street and claims to be Anita Berber; “Anyone who says A must also say -rsch!” However, anyone who says -rsch ends up in a nutcase. She copes with everyday life in the insane asylum with outrageous anarchist slogans, and in between she imagines herself as the devil Anita - portrayed by Ina Blum  - in a scene based on Otto Dix and George-Grosz - images of rotten drooling voyeurs from old poison cabinet silent films. With the dancer Mikael Honesseau as Berber's dance and vice partner Sebastian Droste , “Anita” Blum writhes in depravity ecstasies in the style of Expressionist painting.

The film premiered on February 19, 1988 in the Panorama series in the 1988 Berlinale competition ; the cinema release was on February 25th.

Reviews

Ponkie wrote in the AZ : “Among Rosa von Praunheim's film curiosities from the basement holes of the bourgeois filthy phantasy ( our corpse are still alive , Horror Vacui ), this frivolous object of pleasure is a particularly successful example. The biographies of two contemporaries, interwoven with a high degree of stylistic refinement, form a virtuoso eccentric vicious dream: a silent film art porno as a grotesque horror and a psychogram of time. (...) The Anita-Irre is indeed a luxury bitch without a social conscience, but her greed for excessive life has format: the old woman is still screaming for a taxi from the mortuary table. Suff, drugs, syphilis and sado sex, total enjoyment and total ruin: a horror cabinet full of comedy and magic. "

Ulrich Behrens wrote in Filmzentrale : “Anita - Dances of Vice plays with the confusion, identification and distancing of the grays - consequently also in black and white, especially those filmed in gray - the present against the colorful, vicious past. In addition to one who thinks she is Rosa Luxemburg (Eva-Maria Kurz), a religiously fanatical patient (Friedrich Steinhauer) and several others, Ms. Kutowski / Berber does not give up. No, she rhymes, screams, laughs, and turns the word around in the mouths of the doctors and psychologists, nurses and nurses so that it fits - to their situation. And that suits us perfectly too. Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether she's the Kutowski or the Berber - or the Huber. She lives as Anita. And Rosa von Praunheim alternates between the monotonous gray of the psychiatric present and the colorful memories of the past of the 1920s. Anita - Dances of Vice is also the life story of Anita Berber, who began her short career as a femme fatale and dancer in 1916, in the middle of the First World War . (...) "

“Change to psychiatry: Lotti Huber alias Frau Kutowski alias Anita is taken to the psychiatrist (Hannelene Limpach) and is amazed at the yawning emptiness of the room, the desolation that reigns here. The psychiatrist has no chance with Mrs. Kutowski. At some point the latter sits on the doctor's lap and says: 'Don't always fumble with my soul. Fiddle around with something else. ' Lotti Huber's wife Kutowski fills every room in this psychiatry with life, with suggestive, even erotic, cynical and revealing things, with joie de vivre, for example when she invites her fellow patients to dance and they follow her. Mrs. Kutowski takes a seat, and when the doctors think she died at the end, it's just a stair joke. She faints when her sister (also played by Ina Blum) asks her why she wanted to be Anita Berber of all people - and not Inge Meysel . And then this woman, Anita-Lotti-Kutowski, gets up again and goes out of the institution. "

literature

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